We bet you’ve been calling it marijuana your whole life; what if we told you that you’re just the victim of a big lie?
In the 1930’s the United States was being brainwashed with refer madness, and in 1937 Harry Anslinger wrote an article about the curse of cannabis, titled “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth,” which was published in The American Magazine.
Anslinger was the commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics during the presidencies of Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. During this time, he implemented draconian drug laws and ridiculously long prison sentences that would fuel America’s prison-industrial complex.
He was once quoted as saying, “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Besides bigotry, critics of Anslinger’s say there was also a hidden agenda in his campaign against marijuana.
Some believe that Anslinger conspired with William Randolph Hearst to create a highly sensational anti-marijuana campaign to eliminate hemp as an industrial competitor to cotton and timber. Anslinger’s fear mongering was effective and his choice of words was as well.
He began to use the word “Marihuana” or “Marijuana” instead of cannabis, hoping that the Spanish word would help grow anti-Mexican sentiment. His push to demonize cannabis culminated in the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, which basically made marijuana illegal.
Newspapers, especially those owned by William Randolph Hearst, and Television networks were completely onboard with refer madness. Their pages were littered with sensational and unverifiable stories of marijuana users chopping up their families, Mexican marijuana criminals, and negro Jazz musicians seducing white women with reefer. Anslinger’s choice of words is why we call our favorite plant marijuana, and why this word can have a negative and even racist connotation to some people.
It’s time for us to travel further back so that we may understand the true roots of the word MARIJUANA. The word Marijuana was born out of the first cannabis probation in the Americas, during the Spanish colonization of modern-day Mexico and the Caribbean.
The Spanish were Christianizing the local populations and forcing them to abandon their traditional beliefs. This made many indigenous populations loose ritual and ceremonial practices such as the use of psychoactive plants like peyote, mushrooms, and ayahuasca.
At the same time the Spaniards had brought hemp with them on their voyages, and they were requiring the indigenous people to grow it for the purposes of food, fuel, and fiber. although they were growing “hemp” their cannabis varieties could have been producing significant amounts of THC and other cannabinoids.
At some point they realized this plant had incredibly special psychoactive effects, and they began to use it in much the same way as they had been using their past psychoactive plants.
In order to continue these practices the indigenous people had to hide it from the Spanish in plain sight by giving the plant and the ceremonies a very Christian flavor. Various names for the cannabis start to appear such as Donjia maria, Rosa Maria, and later on Marijuana.
These terms all have Maria incorporated in them in order to attach it to the mother Mary, and intern fool the Spanish into believing these plants were for Christian purposes. This technique helped indigenous groups use marijuana and to reincorporate their past substances.
To this day we see ceremonies in Mexico for example, that use psilocybin mushrooms and have Christian elements mixed in with traditional practices.
Today we all know the word Marijuana. Many people today are trying to eliminate the use of the word in the medical and recreational industry because they perceive it only as negative and racist.
Do these same people know the history of the word before the 1930’s Marijuana prohibition? Is the word Marijuana inherently racist? Or should this word be reclaimed and celebrated as a piece of history that represents the original resistance against prohibition?
